


Year Zero

by RurouniHime



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Angst, Cooking, Established Relationship, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Future Fic, Introspection, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-23
Updated: 2012-02-23
Packaged: 2017-10-31 15:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Methos has an epiphany while shopping for fruit. Go figure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Year Zero

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERS for Highlander The Series, seasons 3-6 (namely the Horseman Arc and the Something Wicked arc). Story does not take Highlander: The Source into account.

 

It is cruel that it should happen over strawberries. 

Methos felt his consciousness bend and take hold, warped in the presence of supple red flesh adorned with delicate golden seeds. Such innocent fruit, witnesses to his doom. It would have been terribly funny in other circumstances.

He can see it before him, amidst the soft voices of people wandering the produce stands, filling their bags with crisp broccoli and water-sprinkled lettuce. His hand droops, lowering a ripe peach into the strawberry crate before it can reach the plastic sack he holds.

He can see the date when he will die.

There is no exact day. The date of his death will simply be when the Gathering finally occurs.

His thoughts… are clearly not making much sense. Round and round. But he’s never been so sure of anything, never known such absolutism as he does now, standing beside the peaches and strawberries of the world with the intention of making cobbler for Duncan after dinner, needing cream and flour and then suddenly seeing his demise there next to the green onions.

He breathes. It passes, and he still needs cream and flour. Nothing has changed. He just wishes he’d received the memo that things had been different for some time already.

His sword is a dull weight against his ribs. “Good lord,” he whispers, and cannot hear the words over the general noise, but knows he has spoken them anyway. 

It’s not because he isn’t an especially good fighter. It’s not because others are better, or because he suspects there is no Immortal in existence who will be able to flee the Gathering when it arrives. He has made an art out of fleeing. He’s lived forever, and this is the first time he’s ever actually seen the end of his life. Nothing beyond it.

There is no dreadful fatality there in the middle of the farmer’s market, no convulsing heap of limbs and nerves and clanging steel against dirt. It’s less melodramatic than he’d expected. It is simply made of ‘two’. When the Gathering comes, he will not survive it because

—one—

He won’t kill Duncan, and

—two—

If Duncan dies by another’s hand, Methos won’t need to witness the world after.

After death. After _Duncan_. A.D.

The humor is painful.

He knows this may change; he's seen his own outlook shift over the centuries as if it were a yearning, struggling thing. What is promised is rarely absolute, even to oneself. But on this day, under this sunlight and breathing this air... _he knows_.

Suddenly he can't breathe. Methos wonders. He's never died of asphyxiation. Drowning, yes. Strangulation? Many times. But never from simply standing in the middle of the clear air and not being able to breathe it in.

He lifts the peach again, watching the shape go as vague as fog and shimmer back into clarity. Drops it into his bag, takes a step— and, at last, a breath. Something about the air tastes different. 

“Good lord, I’m going to die,” he finishes. He looks to his right and finds a mortal woman staring at him, hearing him, thinking he must be insane or just a terribly morbid person. He smiles at her, knowing it will calm her in spite of his strange declaration, in spite of the fact that she’s never seen him before. She blinks and returns to her bin of garlic cloves, and mortality rushes right back in.

He wonders if he should inform Duncan, if this is one of those things the Highlander would grind his teeth over. It seems a reasonable requirement to inform one’s lover of one’s impending death.

It shouldn’t be shocking. Immortal is just a word, meant to cover up unsavory truths because even the purpose of the Immortals negates the fact of their immortality. All but one of them never was immortal to begin with. At some point in the future, there will be a time after Methos.

A. M. There hasn't been an After Methos for over five thousand years.

There _has_ , however, been another A.D. 

After Death.

A time of great and desperate rejoicing. If only he'd felt like doing such a thing.

Methos pays for his fruit mechanically, and it is not until he has departed from the stalls that he falters in his step, presses a hand to his forehead, and… sinks. 

Great and desperate rejoicing.

Methos tastes the rawness of his own throat, the burning and the iron and the desolation. He knows Death is swimming just beneath it again, pitiful bastard. Or is _he_ the pitiful bastard? It seems he has been an arrogant arse at least, because ever since he met Duncan, Death has been assured it will have him in the end.

He needs cream and flour.

Methos finds a grocery store and pushes through the door into air conditioned absolution.

Perhaps that’s why Duncan MacLeod was born when he was and not earlier. Death, roaming free, would have killed Duncan without a second thought, had the man been alive back then. Death would never have moved into Duncan’s life, into his arms, and into his bed, but Methos… Methos has done it for years. Methos was always meant to do it.

So Death had to die. To pass. Methos was never meant to kill Duncan MacLeod. He spent four thousand six hundred odd years waiting for the man, for his soulmate, if he wants to be especially sentimental about it.

What exactly is different about Duncan? Methos frowns, not liking the new fit on his face, and thinks, why Duncan and not Byron, not Darius, not Kronos? And then realizes that Duncan is the first one from whom he hasn’t had to hide things. That for some time now, he’s never had to hide anything, whether on purpose or by accident. He is all of his personalities with Duncan, Duncan knows all of those people: Methos, Benjamin, Adam, and Death, yes, even Death. Duncan may not especially like Death, but he does know him. There is no one left for Methos to bring forward, to bend on both knees before Duncan and raise hands in confession. He can be all of those people. Even Alexa didn’t know about the others, and Byron… well. Methos could not bring Death into Byron’s sphere. The casualty to his own heart would have been much too great at that rejection.

He has only one thing left that he hasn’t opened up to Duncan’s view. Duncan said once that they were not lovers, but more, two people knowing each other completely, in the physical as well as the personal. But Methos has kept the emotional toll apart until now. If only Duncan were aware of how many things Methos had been unable to keep his fingers wrapped around this past decade, watching helplessly as they slipped into the open with or without his consent. And had Duncan even noticed? Known what was really searing through the air around him, known what Methos was constantly losing his hold over?

Maybe if he’d just given up and let go, the casualty list would not have been so costly. Duncan had almost been on that list, not in body but in soul. Methos had almost truly lost him then.

He doesn’t think that could happen now. He’s not sure what’s different, and yet he knows it’s all different.

He knows if Kronos walked up to Duncan now, Methos would kill him without wasting time to breathe. Caspian means far less, and even Silas… yes, even Silas, though he might give Silas more time to explain himself. 

But the threat. The threat would be the same and it would have the same result. Five years ago, Methos could not have been so sure. Now, it has become part of his gospel, fully articulated and indestructible.

He’s seen Death only once since it left him alone and went on its interminable way. Not with Kronos and the rest; even then, Death was never truly present. No, the echo he saw came before Kronos’ return, and it did not reappear in Methos’ own face. It was a ripple reflection in a much more dear countenance long before Methos was ready to see it. 

As if he could ever really be ready for _that_.

Duncan had looked him in the eye, turned, and cut down another man. And enjoyed it. He’d enjoyed taking the life, not because it was a life but because it was a friend’s life. Sean Burns’ life. It felt all too familiar, the tension, the fever, the very smell on the air. Methos had not expected the loss of oxygen, the sudden, horrible symmetry. To see himself coming to life in that other face. 

_Do you know what evil is? Dark, soulless evil? Imagine it. Live it!_

He already had. Part of him had longed to spit it out then, to offer all the wisdom he’d gained if only it would put things into perspective. But what if that perspective had been the opposite of what he’d hoped? What if Duncan had chosen to fall instead, as Methos had done ages back? There was nothing to stop it from happening except Duncan himself, if he was strong enough. And if Methos had taken Duncan’s head then, as he’d said he would do, he has no doubt Death would have come roaring back, the door wide open, the soul… injured beyond belief.

_You will go mad._

In that, Duncan had been absolutely right.

Methos picks at it, stands in the middle of the store and wonders if it would have changed anything. Concludes that he just doesn’t know. If thoughts can make one go mad, Methos knows he’s likely right on the brink of it, his cup sloshing over the top. And this, this is comforting, yet still maddening, the cure and the disease all in one Scottish package.

His life could have ended any one of a hundred times at Duncan’s hand. Why should this one give him such encompassing complacency, and such sorrow?

He should go home. Wrap up in a blanket on the couch and take a nap, and stop _thinking_ such god awful idiocy. Whenever the Gathering happens, it won’t be this century, and it certainly won’t be before dessert tonight. 

He makes his way down the road, in and out of another shop, purchasing the remaining ingredients automatically, trying to feel more than just sunlight once he’s outside again, but the warmth is elusive, the colors leeched to their anemic centers. The slosh of the river echoes a little too loudly as he approaches the Seine, and Methos thinks it’s a good thing he has the ability to feel Presence, because his mind is everywhere it shouldn’t be, skittering around and around in the same loop.

Duncan’s not at home. Methos comes to a stop, hand stretched out inches from the door, and can’t think of a time he’s needed Duncan’s presence— and his Presence— more than now. 

He wouldn’t even know where to begin, explaining this epiphany of his. It’s not difficult; Methos has come across some troublesome feats of thought in his time. But it makes him shake every time he circles back to the meat of it. He hasn’t built up any kind of resistance to this new— old— reality.

He gets inside, forgoes the nap and sets up his offering on the countertop, using one of Duncan’s Pyrex dishes, a cutting board, several bowls and two keenly honed knives. The fruit comes apart easily as only the ripest can. Methos’ fingers are slick with peach juice and strawberry seeds by the time he sprinkles the streusel on top, whips the cream to a delicate but heavy froth. He doesn’t know what he thinks about after the dish goes into the oven, only that forty minutes pass without him being able to account for them. He has the sense that he’s rather barely kept thought back, filling the spaces with other banal things and carefully blanking those voids when they refuse to be filled. The timer dings, overly loud in the empty barge, and like a harbinger, it precludes the tremble of Presence up his spine.

The utter familiarity comes immediately after. Methos slides the dish out of the oven, turns off the timer, and gets glasses and wine down.

Duncan comes into the barge a full two minutes later, holding bags of takeout Spanish. His feet come to a halt halfway down the steps, and he inhales visibly.

“My god. What on earth _is_ that?”

“Your future,” Methos offers with an amicable lift of his wine flute, “if you’ve brought me paella.”

“For whatever that is, I’ll bring you anything you want.” Duncan crosses to the kitchen area and sets the bags on the counter. Methos offers him his own flute, positioning himself carefully in the way of curious eyes. Duncan tries to look around him to the oven, then gives up with a smile and a shake of his head, and turns to dishing out their meal.

“You’ve already brought me what I want.” It’s out before he can stop it, and Methos feels a bit stupid. A lot sappy. Then again, Duncan MacLeod likes sap, he’s nothing but a floundering romantic. There was a day not too long ago when Methos could look at that and sneer. Now it’s just a big fat lie.

When Duncan turns to question such an inane comment, Methos wheels him in, catches him by the crook of his elbow and kisses the corner of his mouth. He knows he’s giving away the view over his shoulder, but he suddenly doesn’t care.

He hadn’t expected to feel _safe_ after his self-revelation. But he does. Indescribably. It makes him want to go back over everything and find that horrid little fly that muddied up the ointment again.

A second later, he’s there, but… he still feels safe.

“Mm, that looks… Are you alright?” The change in tone is quick, and Methos makes an effort to keep up. Duncan turns him in his arms and stares him up and down, scrutinizing his clothing, his hands, hell, even his wine flute. “Did something happen?”

“No _body_ happened,” he says when he figures out the real question. He exhales, making it extra exasperated for Duncan’s benefit, and squeezes Duncan’s elbow. “We may just be the only Immortals on the entire Continent for all I’ve felt this year.”

It’s only April, but Methos takes gifts readily when they are given him.

Still, Duncan eyes him, even once he has nodded and relaxed his grip on Methos’ upper arms. He picks up his wine again, leaning into Methos’ side against the counter. Methos leans back.

“So. You saw.”

“You aren’t exactly hiding it, just so you know.” Duncan flicks his ear lightly with a finger and smiles.

“First crop of peaches,” Methos murmurs. He wants a kiss, he _really_ wants one. He’d even be willing to postpone dinner if it got him that, and whatever else followed. He has no bloody idea where the awfulness of the marketplace went, but it’s gone somehow, chased back into the shadows by Duncan’s presence. Methos insinuates his free arm around Duncan’s back and tucks them together, fits his hips just so and feels it when Duncan’s stance shifts to accommodate. To welcome. “I think it’s an anniversary.”

“Oh?”

“Some upstart child once came back to me in a cave full of holy water outside Paris,” he answers, a little sing-song. “Just took my hand and pulled himself out of a puddle. And I thought, oh, he’ll never remember this.”

Duncan leans in and presses his lips to Methos’ temple. Breathes him in. Kisses him again.

And it’s so very clear: As long as Methos lives, he’ll kill anyone that tries to take Duncan’s life, tries to leave him alone in this world.

 _You’re going to win,_ he almost says. Right there in the kitchen over paella and cobbler, almost whispers it into Duncan’s ear. All the explanations on its tail, jumbled in his head, waiting to get out, be heard. _You’ll be the last one standing, if I have anything to say about it._

And maybe there wouldn’t necessarily be a fight if he did say it all aloud. Because he can hear Duncan’s response in his mind as clearly as if his lover has spoken it aloud.

He knows Duncan will look him in the eye and tell him that, in the face of all that— if Methos and he are the last ones standing— there will always be two at the end.

~fin~


End file.
